scholarly journals The European Convention of Human Rights and Migration at Sea: Reading the “Jurisdictional Threshold” of the Convention Under the Law of the Sea Paradigm

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-435
Author(s):  
Efthymios Papastavridis

AbstractIn all the applications before the ECtHR concerning migration at sea, a preliminary, yet seminal, question is whether the applicants were within the jurisdiction of the respondent State, in terms of Article 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This question becomes even more apposite in contemporary situations of remote interception or search and rescue operations. In addressing the matter of jurisdiction in such cases, the law of the sea becomes of significant importance. This Article argues that as the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) has often taken into account human rights considerations, similarly, the European Court of Human Rights should read into the term “jurisdiction” under Article 1 of ECHR law of the sea considerations. Far from resurrecting Banković and the strict “general international law” notion of jurisdiction under ECHR, this Article only intends to shed some light on when a State would be considered as exercising such “authority and control over persons” in the maritime domain. In so doing, this Article will focus only on the potential application of the ECHR to the most common practices of States vis-à-vis migration on the high seas, namely interception and rescue operations.

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-187
Author(s):  
Rosana Garciandia

AbstractThe European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) follows its own rules regarding the responsibility of states, although the international law of state responsibility enshrined in the International Law Commission (ILC) Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA) remains, as general international law, relevant to its decisions. However, case law of the ECtHR shows that the Court is departing from certain ARSIWA principles as it adopts a broad interpretation of rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) giving rise to positive obligations.1Exploring those trends in the state responsibility regime of the ECHR, this article argues that, by clarifying certain ARSIWA provisions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can play an important role by contributing to a higher degree of judicial integration on the law of state responsibility. It is desirable that the ICJ takes any upcoming opportunity to provide greater clarity on the challenges and nuances of the applicability of the law of state responsibility, in particular as it relates to positive obligations. That would contribute to a more systematic use of those rules by regional courts such as the ECtHR, and ultimately to guaranteeing a greater protection of human rights.


2003 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Voyiakis

This comment discusses three recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the cases of McElhinney v Ireland, Al-Adsani v UK, and Fogarty v UK. All three applications concerned the dismissal by the courts of the respondent States of claims against a third State on the ground of that State's immunity from suit. They thus raised important questions about the relation the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention)—especially the right to a fair trial and access to court enshrined in Arcticle 6(1)—and the law of State immunity.


2007 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luzius Wildhaber

AbstractThis article is an expanded and footnoted version of the lectur given at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law on Tuesday 21 March 2006, entitled ‘International Law in the European Court of Human Rights’.The article begins with some comparative comments on the application of the European Convention on Human Rights in monistic and dualistic systems It then discusses in detail the European Court's case law which confirms that the Convention, despite its special character as a human rights treaty, is indeed part of public international law. It concludes that the Convention and international law find themselves in a kind of interactive mutual relationship. checking and buildine on each other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Roman Kolodkin

Normative propositions of the international courts, including these of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, are considered in the paper as provisions in the judicial decisions and advisory opinions, spelling out, formulating or describing international law norms, prescriptions, prohibitions or authorizations, which are applicable, in the court’s view, in the case at hand and the similar cases. Such a proposition is considered to be a description of a legal norm, its spelling out by a court, but not a norm or its source. In contrast with legal norms, judicial normative propositions are descriptive, not prescriptive; they may be true or wrong. Normative propositions are not transformed into norms solely by their repetition in judicial decisions. The author considers not only ITLOS decisions but also the Tribunal’s and its Seabed disputes chamber advisory opinions containing normative propositions to be subsidiary means for the determination of the rules of law under article 38(1(d)) of the International Court of Justice Statute. The legal reasoning of the Tribunal’s decision, not its operative provisions, usually features normative propositions. While strictly speaking, the decision addresses the parties of the dispute, normative propositions in the reasoning are in fact enacted by the Tribunal urbi et orbi aiming at all relevant actors, ITLOS including. They bear upon substantive and procedural issues, rights and obligations of relevant actors; they may also define legal notions. The Tribunal provides them as part of its reasoning or as obiter dictum. It is those provisions of the Tribunal’s decisions that are of particular importance for international law through detailing treaty- and verbalizing customary rules. However, the States that have the final and decisive say confirming or non-confirming the content and binding nature of the rules spelt out or described by the Tribunal in its normative propositions. Meanwhile, States are not in a hurry to publicly react to the judicial normative propositions, particularly to those of ITLOS, though they refer to them in pleadings or when commenting on the International Law Commission drafts. At times, States concerned argue that international judicial decisions are not binding for third parties. While the States are predominantly silent, ITLOS reiterates, develops and consolidates normative propositions, and they begin to be perceived as law. The paper also points to the possibility of the Tribunal’s normative propositions being not correct and to the role of the judges’ dissenting and separate opinions in identifying such propositions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 863-885 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADAMANTIA RACHOVITSA

AbstractThis article discusses the contribution of the European Court of Human Rights to mitigating difficulties arising from the fragmentation of international law. It argues that the Court's case law provides insights and good practices to be followed. First, the article furnishes evidence that the Court has developed an autonomous and distinct interpretative principle to construe the European Convention on Human Rights by taking other norms of international law into account. Second, it offers a blueprint of the methodology that the Court employs when engaging with external norms in the interpretation process. It analyses the Court's approach to subtle contextual differences between similar or identical international norms and its position towards the requirements of Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT). It concludes that international courts are developing innovative interpretative practices, which may not be strictly based on the letter of the VCLT.


Author(s):  
Egidijus Küris

Western legal tradition gave the birth to the concept of the rule of law. Legal theory and constitutional justice significantly contributed to the crystallisation of its standards and to moving into the direction of the common concept of the rule of law. The European Court of Human Rights uses this concept as an interpretative tool, the extension of which is the quality of the law doctrine, which encompasses concrete requirements for the law under examination in this Court, such as prospectivity of law, its foreseeability, clarity etc. The author of the article, former judge of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court and currently the judge of the European Court of Human Rights, examines how the latter court has gradually intensified (not always consistently) its reliance on the rule of law as a general principle, inherent in all the Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, to the extent that in some of its judgments it concentrates not anymore on the factual situation of an individual applicant, but, first and foremost, on the examination of the quality of the law. The trend is that, having found the quality of the applicable law to be insufficient, the Court considers that the mere existence of contested legislation amounts to an unjustifiable interference into a respective right and finds a violation of respective provisions of the Convention. This is an indication of the Court’s progressing self-approximation to constitutional courts, which are called to exercise abstract norm-control.La tradición occidental alumbró la noción del Estado de Derecho. La teoría del Derecho y la Justicia Constitucional han contribuido decisivamente a la cristalización de sus estándares, ayudando a conformar un acervo común en torno al mismo. El Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos emplea la noción de Estado de Derecho como una herramienta interpretativa, fundamentalmente centrada en la doctrina de la calidad de la ley, que implica requisitos concretos que exige el Tribunal tales como la claridad, la previsibilidad, y la certeza en la redacción y aplicación de la norma. El autor, en la actualidad Juez del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos y anterior Magistrado del Tribunal Constitucional de Lituania, examina cómo el primero ha intensificado gradualmente (no siempre de forma igual de consistente) su confianza en el Estado de Derecho como principio general, inherente a todos los preceptos que forman el Convenio Europeo de Derechos Humanos, hasta el punto de que en algunas de sus resoluciones se concentra no tanto en la situación de hecho del demandante individual sino, sobre todo y ante todo, en el examen de esa calidad de la ley. La tendencia del Tribunal es a considerar que, si observa que la ley no goza de calidad suficiente, la mera existencia de la legislación discutida supone una interferencia injustificable dentro del derecho en cuestión y declara la violación del precepto correspondiente del Convenio. Esto implica el acercamiento progresivo del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos a los Tribunales Constitucionales, quienes tienen encargado el control en abstracto de la norma legal.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 197
Author(s):  
Zeynab Kiani ◽  
Zeynab Purkhaghan

Deportation and extradition have been one of the long-standing issues in international law. After proposing new human rights' issues in the development of international law and human role in international relations, sometimes the question of deportation and extradition is in conflict with European human rights concept. It should distinguish between extradition with similar concepts such as delivery, transfer and dismissal. The extradition is the process that reflects the country's international collaboration and cooperation in the implementation of more stringent standards of criminal justice. Its successful implementation requires the cooperation of different countries in extradition with no political and security excuses. European Court of Human Rights as a judicial organ of the European Convention on Human Rights has issued sentences in its practice regarding some of these conflicts. Researcher with knowledge of neglecting the debate in the Iranian legal system, insists to evaluate the performance of the Human Rights Committee and the European Court of Human Rights in relation to deportation and extradition and procedure that the European Court has dealt using analytical methods to review the extradition from different angles and it is hoped that open a step for progress in Iran's penal policy and the legal in the international arena.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 567-585
Author(s):  
Domenico Carolei

In April 2015, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that Italian legislation is inadequate to criminalise acts of torture (Cestaro v. Italy). Following the ECtHR’s decision, the Italian Parliament approved the bill A.C. 2168 which aimed to introduce the crime of torture (Article 613-bis) in the Italian Criminal Code. The bill does not seem to comply with the definition of torture provided by international law, and also neglects the legislative guidelines outlined by the ECtHR in Cestaro v. Italy. The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it will assess the ECtHR’s decision focusing on Italy’s structural problem and its duty to enact and enforce efficient criminal provisions under Article 3 of the European Convention. On the other hand, it will analyse the normative content of Article 613-bis in order to highlight its weaknesses and propose, on each of them, suggestions for amendment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelena Gligorijević

Abstract Protecting children’s informational privacy has never been more difficult. To what extent does it depend upon parental control and consent, and how is this factor incorporated into the law seeking to protect children’s informational privacy? This article addresses these questions, considering the relevant jurisprudence of the English courts, in particular under the tort of misuse of private information, and the relevant jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In this article I argue that the relevant jurisprudence in both jurisdictions reveals a doctrine that prioritises parental control and consent, above the harm of intrusion to the child. This risks laying a legal terrain that does not accommodate the protection and vindication of children’s informational privacy rights when they conflict with the wishes of, or are not actively protected by, that child’s parents.


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